Blake Hall
speaker
270 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Blake Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I got a little bit of poison ivy right at the end of bending phase. And I begged the medic to give me some steroids because I'm just super allergic to it. Didn't give me steroids. Poison ivy spreads all over my body. They see that. Then they finally give me the steroids. That weakens my immune system. I get bronchitis.
And you're carrying these 75 and 80 pound rocks up a mountain in mountain phase. And I could barely breathe. I would see starbursts of color as we crested a ridge because I just couldn't get enough So I was still so proud completing Mountain Phase just as a personal achievement, I think was where I had to dig deepest in terms of grit.
And it got to the point you jump into Florida Phase and we're jumping into the final phase of Ranger School. The doors are opening. And I just remember I got to this point where... I didn't care if my parachute opened or not because I was that miserable. I just had poison ivy everywhere. I felt terrible. I went at 195 pounds. I graduated at 162. So just starving.
And I just remembered, I don't care if it opens or not. But I also realized I would die before I quit. And that's the purpose of that school and what it means to have a ranger tab is it separates people who are just psychologically really tough and resilient. And as a social signal to the men that you lead and to everyone who sees it, it is an indicator that you have grit. And so I think...
As far as what gives you the right to lead, you have to put yourself through a crucible where you can prove to yourself and to your team that you're worthy to lead that tribe. And so I'm super grateful to Ranger School for providing that to me. The other part after the sort of grit part is that the leader has to be the most skilled at whatever it is they do.
And when I showed up and talked to my men, I said, listen, I might not be the fastest. I might not be the best shooter. I might not be the best at combatives, but I'll be damned if I'm not top five and everything. And so you just have to be really good at at what you do across the board. And it's like sports.
The team captain isn't necessarily the best player on the team, but they're one of the best players. And so I think that combination of grit and skill really matters. The hard part now about being a founder is if you're fortunate enough to scale, you take on more and more scope and the skills you need to be effective. And so you need to be a relentless learner.
But I think at the core, if you care about people, if you have the grit yourself where you'll put in whatever hours it takes, you'll never give up. And then you are curious and you're capable of learning the skill that you need. You got to do all three and you've got to do it in an excellent fashion if you want to keep up with what is required to lead a team and to be an effective leader.
In Iraq, where the stakes were my men's life, there wasn't anything I wasn't willing to do to prepare myself for that. And I think those habits that were so deeply set from when I was a young man in my early 20s have carried through to today.
Yeah. My buddy, Phil Schneider, is my worst day in Iraq. We were in a neighborhood called Dora, which the LA Times referred to as Al Qaeda's Alamo in Baghdad. And we were 13 months into combat. We took more casualties in two weeks in that neighborhood, like a three by five kilometer box. And we take it in the 13 months. It was literally hell.
There were standing sewage because Al Qaeda didn't care about the locals. They'd put in so many bombs into the sewer system. that the sewage was just spilled out. It was a Sunni neighborhood. You had a Shia Iraqi army military unit that would snipe at people as they went out for groceries and things. Then little kids would chuck grenades at us. If there's hell on earth, it was probably Dora.
And so the reason that al-Qaeda would put these roadside bombs into the sewer system is the kind of law of explosives is that the force travels the path of least resistance. So if you have concrete on two sides underneath, but the road is dirt, it's a natural charge that directs upwards into the bottom of a vehicle. So there's two elements to this.
One was when I saw that was happening, they would put 500 pound buried bombs underneath that would literally saw a striker in half, like these 20 ton vehicles from front to back, just rip it completely in half to give you an idea of the force. And so when I saw this during the surge, I wasn't getting a lot of sleep. The first thing I did is I went to the operations center.
I said, give me the infrastructure plans for all the sewage system in Baghdad. And I went out to the truck with my radio telephone operator. And you have a graphic overlay of the streets. And we stayed out there until three in the morning, even though our next mission was like at 630, just until I had the final thing done.
And once I had mapped it, I pushed it out to all the other trucks in our unit. And I said, for us... We are never going to drive on these roads ever if we can avoid it. And if we do avoid it, you guys are both going to the rooftops. You're going to cut every single wire down to the street. Phil was unfortunate enough.
He went across an intersection that had one of these 500-pound bombs underneath it. And my platoon was the first one to... respond to that scene. And it was devastating, as you might imagine. He was just severely concussed, but was just relentless in terms of providing aid to his guys, getting them into the trucks. I'm going to get emotional about it, so I'm sorry.
But we raced a few of the guys who were critically wounded to the green zone, to the combat support hospital that was there. And Phil was just unbelievable. When we finally, when his men were taken care of, he was so concussed, he was puking and he knew that he was about to just pass out. And he just grabbed me by the lapels and he said, Blake, my guys take care of my guys.
And that for me is just, that's what it is right there. His men love him for it, that when the chips are down, you care more about other people than yourself. And his like will, even though he was physically really banged up, got him through it. And I think, man, America is super lucky to have leaders like Phil Schneider. He was decorated for heroism for what he did that day.
Yeah, I'll try to do justice to it because I lost some wonderful friends who were just amazing people that gave their lives for this country. Richard Henkes, my interpreter, Roy, who died with the platoon that followed us. Garrett Slaughter, Ryan Dennison, just wonderful people. And if you serve this country, it's because you believe that people have a right to live free.
Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's the core of what we enjoy, but it is protected at great cost. And you want to protect the weak and the vulnerable who are being oppressed, truly oppressed in terms of values and what they are allowed to say or do. And the way that manifests, we would have, there was an Iraqi woman. She was Sunni. and her husband was Shia.
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